We live in the age of information. With data everywhere, there is a need to categorize and secure the sensitive private data. When we speak with each other or write to each other we exchange information, and this exchange of information forms Communication. The information shared with one person or to large group of people through any electronic medium will be available freely to everyone.
Secure Communication is the process of communicating to the required parties without leaking the information to the unwanted parties or the hackers, who want to steal the private data of the people involved in communication and use it against them on a later date. Secure communication is achieved through Cryptography, which has its main goals as confidentiality and integrity.
On the other hand, the procedure of calculating or determining something by mathematical or logical methods is termed as Computation. It requires working on data from different parties.
Several distributed applications require availability and confidentiality of sensitive data. Encryption provides only confidentiality, but not the privacy of sensitive data, as data must be available / exposed to carry out encryption. So the applications requiring private data cannot be handled by conventional encryption mechanisms, as it requires availability of sensitive data.
The situation here is, we need the private & sensitive data to compute something, but getting the data from the users will violate their privacy. Say, researchers who require the medical data of patients are always in a fix or have to meet all the patients privately to get their concern, which is a big hurdle for research.
The need for Secure Computation, otherwise known as computing on private data arises here. Secure computation computes on private data of the users without revealing their data. The parties involved in secure computation never reveal their private data to the parties involved, but at the same time will be able to obtain the required result out of computing their private data.